Angled like petrified fishlips
‘The snowplows seemed to come from everywhere, with their front shovels angled like petrified fishlips.’ That metaphor stopped me in my tracks. It’s something so incongruous, so unexpected, and then so perfectly fitting that it becomes the most natural thing in the world. The startling metaphor, it almost interrupts the text, but it makes for a strength of voice and charm of character alike. I’ve never seen petrified fishlips. But then I’ve never seen a snowplow either.
I first came across Lorrie Moore via the New Yorker Fiction Podcasts. Subscribe. They’ve bruised my soul at least a dozen times already. Her story, ‘Dance in America’ opens with an incredible description of leading workshops in schools, which almost immediately started churning through a story of my own. I also read her novel Anagrams last year, which delighted me with its quirky leading lady. But the petrified fishlips are from her new novel, A Gate at the Stairs, a novel that I already know is going to be one of those incredibly important books that you carry within you for years.
There’s those metaphors. ‘Like Gertrude Stein speaking through a burqa.’ ‘I lay beneath the sheets… feeling storky.’ ‘The summer moon… an orange peel stuck up their like the lunch garbage of God.’ But more importantly, there’s their speaker, a first-year college student named Tassie, who has moved from a country town to a bigger university city. She’s awkward (‘I searched, as I often found myself having to do, to find a language, or even an octave, in which to speak.’) and slightly naive, she bumbles a bit because she cares too much, she struggles with the isolation and disconnection of university life. And she’s an oddball, constantly toying around with language and looking at the world slightly askew. That is to say, we’d be great mates, Tassie and I. We’d understand each other. And that’s not even getting started on her housemate Murph, a pierced-nosed and gutter-mouthed bombshell of a woman who gives Tassie her old vibrator to stir her milkshakes. Hmm.
But the remarkable thing about The Gate at the Stairs is its complexity of story. Like those constantly erupting metaphors, it constantly throws disparate elements together, in a way that makes it seem that things could never have been otherwise. It’s more than just a coming-of-age story, or a story of a small-town girl finding her feet in the big, bad world. Set in the months immediately after the World Trade Centre attacks (‘we did not yet call [the events] 9/11′), the story moves between Tassie’s two worlds – with her colleagues and employers in Troy, and her potato-farming family in Dellacrosse. So what starts as a surreal and satirical college story becomes a bildingsroman, becomes a love story, becomes a family drama, becomes a tale of race-relations, becomes a search for things lost. The provincial butts up against the metropolitan, and against the dramas of the international world, and Tassie’s struggle is one of how to be, and of how to make meaning, on all of these fronts at once. Her tragedy is realising the full complexity of the world, and the impossibility of coherence within it. (‘The end of comedy was the beginning of all else.’)
And I’ll be haunted by these images for time to come: decaying cheese in a closed-up restaurant. A bleeding ankle on a prayer rug. A young woman dressed as a bird, to frighten mice away from the blades of a harvester. ‘Sky-wide and tree-toppling’ storms. ‘The very particular sadness of a vanished childhood yoghurt now found only in France.’ And Tassie’s riffing description of her hometown, a place that reminds me scarily of mine:
… the dining was divided into ‘casual,’ which meant you ate it standing up or took it away, and the high-end, which was called ‘Sit-Down Dining.’…[and] the seats were red leatherette and the walls were covered with the local gemutlichkeit… sauces were called ’gravy.’ … A la carte meant soup or salad, dinner meant soup and salad…’
I love the excess of this language, the glory of these descriptions. Quite simply, I love this book.
